For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front

2. “One Hundred Percent”: War Service and Women’s Fiction

Post–World War I fiction and personal narratives are known, sometimes erroneously, for their cynicism and bitterness. Fiction written during the war, with few exceptions, is of an entirely different ilk. Magazine fiction, especially concerning women’s war service, lacks cynicism altogether and either promotes participation in ways that correspond with official propaganda or uses the plight of women, especially Belgian women, to advance the idea of war service. To achieve its ends, magazine fiction relies heavily on clichéd images of women: good ones, who might temporarily stray but eventually recognize the error of their ways; wealthy, careless, even evil ones who do not redeem themselves thus; and saintly ones who are pure for the duration of their lives, which are often brief. The good women are the ones who rise to the call of both family and state, who sacrifice themselves and their men to defeat the bloody Hun. Certainly these stereotypes are not new; they are, in fact, archetypal— the fairy godmother and the wicked witch of fairy tales—and perhaps, as Keen argues, they may be imbedded in social institutions . Keen’s claim that “society shapes the psyche and vice versa,” undoubtedly raises a chicken-and-egg dilemma, yet the stereotypes persist within ideal social structures.1 Domestic science , as we have seen, makes use of similar clichés in belittling the housewife who cannot cook and blaming her for whatever bad behavior her husband may exhibit. While the stereotypes “One Hundred Percent” War Service and Women’s Fiction T WO “One Hundred Percent” | 67 may reveal the occasional variation for the sake of suspense, in war fiction, the call to duty and sacrifice remains constant. Long before official American involvement in the war, American magazines included both fiction and nonfiction promoting , at the very least, sensitivity to the predicament of many Europeans.2 Events such as the invasion of Belgium and the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, provided source material for official and unofficial propaganda. One of the most brutal of the “official” stories was that of the handless Belgian baby, the child deliberately mutilated by advancing German soldiers. Arthur Ponsonby in Falsehood in War-Time devotes a chapter to the story, which he declares “everyone wanted to believe, . . . and many [people] went so far as to say they had seen the baby.”3 Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic reported the story as fact and also published photographs of the baby. According to Ponsonby, Le Rive Rouge published two photos, one in September of 1915 and one on July 26, 1916, which depict German soldiers eating the hands.4 Newspapers also vilified the Kaiser in stories and he was burned in effigy frequently in the United States. Critica in Buenos Aires published a drawing supplied by the Allies in which the Kaiser forces women to turn over their children so that he can chop off their hands. Underneath the picture a caption reads, “Suffer little children to come unto me.”5 We will shortly see these images repeated in Wallace Irwin’s short story “One of Ten Million.” Robert Graves in Good-Bye to All That also addresses the question of handless babies. Claiming to have seen children without both hands and feet, Graves believes the wounds were “merely the result of shell-fire, British or French shell-fire as likely as not,” rather than German bayonets, a point to which we shall return in chapter 5.6 As Ponsonby points out, however, neither seems plausible. In his words, “No one paused to ask how long a baby 68 | “One Hundred Percent” would live were its hands cut off unless expert surgical aid were at hand [sic] to tie up the arteries (the answer being, a very few minutes).”7 But the propagandists’ regard for the truth is negligible, and stories involving women and children are too hard to resist. As we observed earlier, according to Ferdinand Tönnies, primary relationships are the foundation of the Gemeinschaft , and propaganda uses those relationships to invoke a sense of community and of threat to the community. Mothers separated from their children or children from their parents and atrocities committed against either group illustrate the most detestable of those threats. Among the posters employing the sinking of the Lusitania is Fred Spear’s “Enlist,” which depicts a drowned mother submerged with...